9 August 2019 - - US-based oncology company Vor Biopharma has appointed Robert Ang, MBBS, MBA as its president and chief executive officer, the company said.

Vor also announced a move into new integrated headquarters in Cambridge, Mass. This expansion follows a recent USD 42m series A financing directed at advancing the company's lead eHSC-based candidate for the treatment of acute myeloid leukemia towards the clinic and further building the pipeline.

Dr. Ang is the former chief business officer of Neon Therapeutics, part of the early team establishing the company prior to its series A investment and through its initial public offering.

Prior to Neon, he served as senior vice president of Business Development at Bavarian Nordic, where he was primarily responsible for conducting a USD 975m transaction between the company and Bristol-Myers Squibb for PROSTVAC, a Phase 3 immuno-oncology asset.

Before joining Bavarian Nordic, Dr. Ang served as Head of both Business Development and Medical Affairs for Cadence Pharmaceuticals (now Mallinckrodt) and worked at Frazier Healthcare Ventures, a life sciences venture capital firm.

At Frazier, he was involved in several pharmaceutical and biotechnology investments including Cadence Pharmaceuticals, Incline Therapeutics (now The Medicines company), Alnara Pharmaceuticals (now Eli Lilly) and Collegium Pharmaceuticals.

Dr. Ang also has experience in strategy consulting at the Boston Consulting Group and has general surgical training. He holds an MBBS (Doctor of Medicine) from the University of Western Australia and an MBA with honors from Columbia Business School.

Vor's lead engineered hematopoietic stem cell product candidate, VOR33, is in development for acute myeloid leukemia.

VOR33 is designed to produce healthy blood cells that lack the receptor CD33, thus enabling the targeting of AML cells through the CD33 antigen while avoiding toxicity to the blood and bone marrow.

Currently, treating AML with therapy that targets CD33 can be effective but may be limited in dose and duration due to toxicity to the blood and bone marrow.

By rendering healthy blood and bone marrow cells 'invisible' to CD33-targeted therapies, VOR33 aims to significantly improve the therapeutic window and effectiveness of these AML therapies with potential to broaden clinical benefit to different patient populations.

Vor's eHSCs are designed to generate healthy, fully functional cells with specific advantageous modifications, for example to protect the blood and bone marrow from the toxic effects of antigen-targeted therapies, protecting healthy cells from depletion but leaving tumor cells vulnerable.

Vor's platform could potentially be used to change the treatment paradigm of both hematopoietic stem cell transplants and antigen-targeted therapies such as antibody drug conjugates, bispecific antibodies and CAR-T cell treatments.

A proof-of-concept study for Vor's lead program has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Vor is based in Cambridge, Mass. and has a broad intellectual property base including in-licenses from Columbia University, where foundational work was conducted by inventor and Vor Scientific Board chair Siddhartha Mukherjee, MD, DPhil.

Vor was founded by Dr. Mukherjee and PureTech Health and is supported by leading investors including 5AM Ventures and RA Capital Management, Johnson and Johnson Innovation JJDC, Inc., Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and Osage University Partners.